Nilmar Janbu

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Nilmar Oskar Charles Janbu (born August 23, 1921 in Nordre Bjørnsund on Bjørnsund in Fræna ( Norway ); † January 4, 2013 in Trondheim ) was a Norwegian civil engineer and a pioneer in soil mechanics. Janbu was professor of geotechnics at the Norwegian Technical University in Trondheim (NTH).

After graduating from high school in 1941, Janbu studied architecture and then civil engineering at the NTH and made his civil engineering diploma in 1947. He then worked as an assistant at the Institute for Statics, before going on a scholarship to Harvard University in 1948 to teach the then leading soil mechanics Arthur Casagrande and Karl von Terzaghi . He earned his masters degree in 1949 and then began writing his PhD thesis at Harvard, which was defended in 1954. In it he dealt with a method that goes beyond the slip circle method for the verification of slope stability, which also allows more general slip curves to be treated as circles and straight lines, one of his best-known works. Since the scholarship had expired, he went back to Oslo before completing his dissertation, where he first worked for a construction company and then from 1952 at the newly founded Geotechnical Institute (headed by Laurits Bjerrum ). He headed its branch and laboratory in Trondheim. From 1961 he was professor for geotechnics at the NTH in Trondheim. He has given guest lectures at numerous universities around the world. His construction projects include Kansai Airport in Japan and Gardermoen Airport in Oslo.

In 1985 he was a Rankine Lecturer . He was an honorary member of the Norwegian Geotechnical Society (whose Laurits Bjerrum Prize he received), a member of the Norwegian Academy of Engineering Sciences and the Norwegian Academy of Sciences. He received the Austen B. Mason Prize from Harvard University.

More than 130 scientific publications come from him and he trained numerous geotechnicians in Trondheim.

Fonts

  • Grunnlag i geoteknikk (Basics of Geotechnics, Norwegian), Tapir, Trondheim 1970
  • Slope stability computations , in: R. Hirschfeld u. a. (Editor): Embankment dam engineering. Casagrande Volume , New York 1973, pp. 47-86
  • with Laurits Bjerrum, Bjørn Kjærnsli: Veiledning ved Løsning av Fundamenteringsoppgaver (Guide to practical solutions in foundation engineering ), NGI Publication No. 16, 1956
  • Slope stability computations , in: R. Hirschfeld (editor): The Embankment Dam Engineering , New York 1973, pp. 47-86
  • Sediment deformations. A classical approach to stress-strain-time behavior of granular media as developed at NTH over a 50 year period , Trondheim 1998.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Obituary at Geoengineer
  2. ^ Janbu Stability analysis of slopes with dimensionless parameters , Harvard Soil Mechanics Series, No. 46, 1954
  3. ^ Janbu Soil models in offshore engineering , Geotechnique, Volume 35, 1985, pp. 241-285